A timely article from the New York TIMES on new information abou the
1918 Flu Epidemic. I thought that some of you might find it interesting.

Scientists Uncover Clues to Flu Epidemic of 1918

By GINA KOLATA
New York TIMES Tuesday, February 16, 1999

  Scientists report Tuesday that they have completed the first major step
in deciphering the secrets of one of the deadliest viruses ever known, the
influenza virus of 1918.  Though their work answers some questions about
the origin of the virus, the scientists say it leaves the most fundamental
question dangling: What made the virus, which killed 20 million to 40
million people worldwide, so lethal?

  Dr. Jeffrey K. Taubenberger of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology
in Washington and his colleagues have determined the sequence of an
essential gene, the hemagglutinin, finding that it is perfectly ordinary
and dashing the hopes of those who had hoped it might hold the virus's
deadly secrets.  But an analysis of that gene did show that a popular
hypothesis -- that the virus jumped directly from birds to people -- was
wrong.  Dr.  Taubenberger's paper is published on Tuesday in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

  Virologists are chilled by the statistics from the 1918 flu, which
killed mostly people age 20 to 40. If such a plague came today, killing a
similar fraction of the United States population, 1.5 million Americans
would die. It would kill more Americans in a single year than die annually
from heart disease, cancers, strokes, chronic pulmonary disease, AIDS and
Alzheimer's disease combined.

  Finding the secret of the 1918 flu has been the ultimate goal of Dr.
Taubenberger's meticulous work, which has riveted the attention of
influenza experts. He expects to complete his genetic analysis, getting
the sequence of all eight of the virus's genes, by the end of the year.
It may be, Dr.  Taubenberger said, that even when every gene of the virus
is known, there will be no answers; perhaps it was many small changes that
combined to make the virus a killer.  Dr. John Oxford, a virologist at
Royal London Hospital, said he suspected that there was an obvious genetic
reason why the virus was so lethal. But Dr. Oxford said that if the virus
turned out to be mundane, if it was something about the circumstances,
like the crowding and troop movements of World War I that caused the
deadly epidemic, "that would give us some degree of comfort because it's
very unlikely that all these things could happen again."  "We're all after
the same goal here," Dr.  Oxford said.

  Dr. Taubenberger's current work gives virologists hope that their goal
is in sight. It a "tour de force," said Dr. Robert Webster, a flu expert
from St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, in a telephone
interview from Hong Kong, where he is instituting a new surveillance
system to look for new and potentially lethal flu strains.  Dr.
Taubenberger and his colleagues began by finding shards of the 1918 virus
in shreds of lung tissue from flu victims, preserved since 1918. Then they
fished the fragments out with powerful methods of molecular biology and
pieced them together.  The scientists chose as their first target the
virus's hemagglutinin gene, which directs the production of a protein that
the virus uses to hoist itself into lung cells. Many virologists thought
that changes in the hemagglutinin gene determined how infectious and how
dangerous a flu strain could be.  While Dr. Taubenberger's analysis of
that gene did not reveal any such nefarious features, it did cast doubt on
a widespread hypothesis about the origins of deadly flu strains.  In two
other flu epidemics this century, in 1957 and 1968, a new virus that
resembled bird viruses swept the world, leading Dr.  Webster to propose
that the worst strains of flu viruses arise in birds.  But Dr.
Taubenberger found that the 1918 virus was more closely related to viruses
that infect pigs.  "That's different from the pandemics of 1957 and 1968,"
he said. "It makes the hypothesis a bit more complicated."  He cannot say
whether the virus jumped from pigs to humans or from humans to pigs, but,
he said, he can rule out a direct avian origin.

  The work also showed that the 1918 virus apparently did not change much
as it circled the globe. Dr. Taubenberger and his colleagues analyzed the
complete hemagglutinin gene from one flu victim and half of it from two
others. They found that the gene remained unchanged.  Lung samples from
three people who died of the flu in 1918 ended up in Dr. Taubenberger's
laboratory in fortuitous ways.  One sample was from a 21-year-old Army
private, Roscoe Vaughan, who died in Camp Jackson, S.C., at 6:30 A.M. on
Sept. 26, 1918. At 2 P.M., an Army doctor arrived to do an autopsy,
cutting off a slice from Mr. Vaughan's lungs, impregnating it with
formaldehyde and embedding it in a chunk of candle wax about the size of a
thumbnail. Then he sent it to Washington, where it was stored in a small
brown box on a shelf of a vast pathology warehouse until Dr. Taubenberger
found it one day in 1996.  On the same day that Private Vaughan died, Pvt.
James Downs, a 30-year-old soldier at Camp Upton, N.Y., succumbed to
influenza after three days in the base hospital. He, too, was autopsied,
by an army captain who wrote that a "bloody froth" came from Private
Downs's lungs. His lung tissue, too, ended up in the pathology warehouse,
stored until 1996.  Two months after the soldiers died, an obese woman
died when the flu swept through her isolated Alaskan village.  She was
buried in a mass grave, along with 72 other adults -- virtually all of the
adults who lived there. Dr. Johan V. Hultin, a retired pathologist from
San Francisco, unearthed the woman's still-frozen body about a year and a
half ago and sent samples of her lungs to Dr.  Taubenberger for his
analysis.

Copyright 1999 The New York Times Fair use reprint for nonprofit
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